Antitrust & Competition Policy

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is taking a more active interest in state and local barriers to entry and innovation that could threaten the continued growth of the digital economy in general and the sharing economy in particular. The agency recently announced it would be hosting a June 9th workshop “to examine competition, consumer protection, and economic issues raised by the proliferation of online and mobile peer-to peer business platforms in certain sectors of the [sharing] economy.” Filings are due to the agency in this matter by May 26th. (Along with my Mercatus Center colleagues, I will be submitting comments and also releasing a big paper on reputational feedback mechanisms that same week. We have already released this paper on the general topic.)

Relatedly, just yesterday, the FTC sent a letter to Michigan policymakers about restricting entry by Tesla and other direct-to-consumer sellers of vehicles. Michigan passed a law in October 2014 prohibiting such direct sales. The FTC’s strongly-worded letter decries the state’s law as “protectionism for independent franchised dealers” noting that “current provisions operate as a special protection for dealers—a protection that is likely harming both competition and consumers.” The agency argues that:

consumers are the ones best situated to choose for themselves both the vehicles they want to buy and how they want to buy them. Automobile manufacturers have an economic incentive to respond to consumer preferences by choosing the most effective distribution method for their vehicle brands. Absent supportable public policy considerations, the law should permit automobile manufacturers to choose their distribution method to be responsive to the desires of motor vehicle buyers.

The agency cites the “well-developed body of research on these issues strongly suggests that government restrictions on distribution are rarely desirable for consumers” and the staff letter continues on to utterly demolish the bogus arguments set forth by defenders of the blatantly self-serving, cronyist law. (For more discussion of just how anti-competitive and anti-consumer these laws are in practice, see this January 2015 Mercatus Center study, “State Franchise Law Carjacks Auto Buyers,” by Jerry Ellig and Jesse Martinez.) Continue reading →

A bill before Congress would for the first time require radio broadcasters to pay royalty fees to recording artists and record labels pursuant to the Copyright Act. The proposed Fair Play Fair Pay Act (H.R. 1733) would “[make] sure that all radio services play by the same rules, and all artists are fairly compensated,” according to Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY).

… AM/FM radio has used whatever music it wants without paying a cent to the musicians, vocalists, and labels that created it. Satellite radio has paid below market royalties for the music it uses …

The bill would still allow for different fees for AM/FM radio, satellite radio and Internet radio, but it would mandate a “minimum fee” for each type of service for the first time.

A February report from the U.S. Copyright Office cites the promotional value of airtime as the longstanding justification for exempting terrestrial radio broadcasters from paying royalties under the Copyright Act.

In the traditional view of the market, broadcasters and labels representing copyright owners enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship whereby terrestrial radio stations exploit sound recordings to attract the listener pools that generate advertising dollars, and, in return, sound recording owners receive exposure that promotes record and other sales.

The Copyright Office now feels there are “significant questions” whether the traditional view remains credible today. But significant questions are not the same thing as clear evidence. Continue reading →

Many readers will recall the telecom soap opera featuring the GPS industry and LightSquared and the subsequent bankruptcy of LightSquared. Economist Thomas W. Hazlett (who is now at Clemson, after a long tenure at the GMU School of Law) and I wrote an article published in the Duke Law & Technology Review titled Tragedy of the Regulatory Commons: Lightsquared and the Missing Spectrum Rights. The piece documents LightSquared’s ambitions and dramatic collapse. Contrary to popular reporting on this story, this was not a failure of technology. We make the case that, instead, the FCC’s method of rights assignment led to the demise of LightSquared and deprived American consumers of a new nationwide wireless network. Our analysis has important implications as the FCC and Congress seek to make wide swaths of spectrum available for unlicensed devices. Namely, our paper suggests that the top-down administrative planning model is increasingly harming consumers and delaying new technologies.

Read commentary from the GPS community about LightSquared and you’ll get the impression LightSquared is run by rapacious financiers (namely CEO Phil Falcone) who were willing to flaunt FCC rules and endanger thousands of American lives with their proposed LTE network. LightSquared filings, on the other hand, paint the GPS community as defense-backed dinosaurs who abused the political process to protect their deficient devices from an innovative entrant. As is often the case, it’s more complicated than these morality plays. We don’t find villains in this tale–simply destructive rent-seeking triggered by poor FCC spectrum policy.

We avoid assigning fault to either LightSquared or GPS, but we stipulate that there were serious interference problems between LightSquared’s network and GPS devices. Interference is not an intractable problem, however. Interference is resolved everyday in other circumstances. The problem here was intractable because GPS users are dispersed and unlicensed (including government users), and could not coordinate and bargain with LightSquared when problems arose. There is no feasible way for GPS companies to track down and compel users to use more efficient devices, for instance, if LightSquared compensated them for the hassle. Knowing that GPS mitigation was unfeasible, LightSquared’s only recourse after GPS users objected to the new LTE network was through the political and regulatory process, a fight LightSquared lost badly. The biggest losers, however, were consumers, who were deprived of another wireless broadband network because FCC spectrum assignment prevented win-win bargaining between licensees. Continue reading →

The FCC is currently considering ways to make municipal broadband projects easier to deploy, an exercise that has drawn substantial criticism from Republicans, who passed a bill to prevent FCC preemption of state laws. Today the Mercatus Center released a policy analysis of municipal broadband projects, titled Community Broadband, Community Benefits? An Economic Analysis of Local Government Broadband Initiatives. The researcher is Brian Deignan, an alumnus of the Mercatus Center MA Fellowship. Brian wrote an excellent, empirical paper about the economic effects of publicly-funded broadband.

It’s remarkable how little empirical research there is on municipal broadband investment, despite years of federal data and billions of dollars in federal investment (notably, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act). This dearth of research is in part because muni broadband proponents, as Brian points out, expressly downplay the relevance of economic evidence and suggest that the primary social benefits of muni broadband cannot be measured using traditional metrics. The current “research” about muni broadband, pro- and anti-, tends to be unfalsifiable generalizations based on extrapolations of cherry-picked examples. (There are several successes and failures, depending on your point of view.)

Brian’s paper provides researchers a great starting point when they attempt to answer an increasingly important policy question: What is the economic impact of publicly-funded broadband? Brian uses 23 years of BLS data from 80 cities that have deployed broadband and analyzes muni broadband’s effect on 1) quantity of businesses; 2) employee wages; and 3) employment. Continue reading →

There are several “flavors” of net neutrality–Eli Noam at Columbia University estimates there are seven distinct meanings of the term–but most net neutrality proponents agree that reinterpreting the 1934 Communications Act and “classifying” Internet service providers as Title II “telecommunications” companies is the best way forward. Proponents argue that ISPs are common carriers and therefore should be regulated much like common carrier telephone companies. Last week I filed a public interest comment about net neutrality and pointed out why the Title II option is unwise and possibly illegal. Continue reading →

There’s a small but influential number of tech reporters and scholars who seem to delight in making the US sound like a broadband and technology backwater. A new Mercatus working paper by Roslyn Layton, a PhD fellow at a research center at Aalborg University, and Michael Horney a researcher at the Free State Foundation, counter that narrative and highlight data from several studies that show the US is at or near the top in important broadband categories.

For example, per Pew and ITU data, the vast majority of Americans use the Internet and the US is second in the world in data consumption per capita, trailing only South Korea. Pew reveals that for those who are not online the leading reasons are lack of usability and the Internet’s perceived lack of benefits. High cost, notably, is not the primary reason for infrequent use.

I’ve noted before some of the methodological problems in studies claiming the US has unusually high broadband prices. In what I consider their biggest contribution to the literature, Layton and Horney highlight another broadband cost frequently omitted in international comparisons: the mandatory media license fees many nations impose on broadband and television subscribers.

These fees can add as much as $44 to the monthly cost of broadband. When these fees are included in comparisons, American prices are frequently an even better value. In two-thirds of European countries and half of Asian countries, households pay a media license fee on top of the subscription fees to use devices such as connected computers and TVs.

…When calculating the real cost of international broadband prices, one needs to take into account media license fees, taxation, and subsidies. …[T]hese inputs can materially affect the cost of broadband, especially in countries where broadband is subject to value-added taxes as high as 27 percent, not to mention media license fees of hundreds of dollars per year.

US broadband providers, the authors point out, have priced broadband relatively efficiently for heterogenous uses–there are low-cost, low-bandwidth connections available as well as more expensive, higher-quality connections for intensive users.

Further, the US is well-positioned for future broadband use. Unlike many wealthy countries, Americans typically have access, at least, to broadband from telephone companies (like AT&T DSL or UVerse) as well as from a local cable provider. Competition between ISPs has meant steady investment in network upgrades, despite the 2008 global recession. The story is very different in much of Europe, where broadband investment, as a percentage of the global total, has fallen noticeably in recent years. US wireless broadband is also a bright spot: 97% of Americans can subscribe to 4G LTE while only 26% in the EU have access (which partially explains, by the way, why Europeans often pay less for mobile subscriptions–they’re using an inferior product).

There’s a lot to praise in the study and it’s necessary reading for anyone looking to understand how US broadband policy compares to other nations’. The fashionable arguments that the US is at risk of falling behind technologically were never convincing–the US is THE place to be if you’re a tech company or startup, for one–but Layton and Horney show the vulnerability of that narrative with data and rigor.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently sought additional comment on whether it should eliminate its network non-duplication and syndicated exclusivity rules (known as the “broadcasting exclusivity” rules). It should just as well have asked whether it should eliminate its rules governing broadcast television. Local TV stations could not survive without broadcast exclusivity rights that are enforceable both legally and practicably.

The FCC’s broadcast exclusivity rules “do not create rights but rather provide a means for the parties to exclusive contracts to enforce them through the Commission rather than the courts.” (Broadcast Exclusivity Order, FCC 88-180 at ¶ 120 (1988)) The rights themselves are created through private contracts between TV stations and video programming vendors in the same manner that MVPDs create exclusive rights to distribute cable network programming.

Local TV stations typically negotiate contracts for the exclusive distribution of national broadcast network or syndicated programming in their respective local markets in order to preserve their ability to obtain local advertising revenue. The FCC has long recognized that, “When the same program a [local] broadcaster is showing is available via cable transmission of a duplicative [distant] signal, the [local] broadcaster will attract a smaller audience, reducing the amount of advertising revenue it can garner.” (Program Access Order, FCC 12-123 at ¶ 62 (2012)) Enforceable broadcast exclusivity agreements are thus necessary for local TV stations to generate the advertising revenue that is necessary for them to survive the government’s mandatory broadcast television business model.

The FCC determined nearly fifty years ago that it is an anticompetitive practice for multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) to import distant broadcast signals into local markets that duplicate network and syndicated programming to which local stations have purchased exclusive rights. (See First Exclusivity Order, 38 FCC 683, 703-704 (1965)) Though the video marketplace has changed since 1965, the government’s mandatory broadcast business model is still required by law, and MVPD violations of broadcast exclusivity rights are still anticompetitive. Continue reading →